The Good Mayor (13 page)

Tibo ignored all that. He was an only child and nobody’s uncle. Instead, he walked straight up to a wire rack of coloured postcards hanging on the back wall and took down one of Diana and Acteon. He looked at it closely. There was no doubt, in a certain light, seen at a certain angle, the casual observer might, if he didn’t know any better, see, perhaps, a passing resemblance to Agathe Stopak—purely superficially, of course. Tibo reached to put the card back on the rack, thought better of it, dug into his waistcoat pocket for a few coins, joined the queue behind a bouncing child and its sighing mother and it was only then that he noticed, on another rack, another postcard. This one was different—not a souvenir card of the paintings on show in the museum but hung on one of those columns of rotating racks where the sign at the top advertised:

Tibo saw it flashing past, once a second, as the bouncing child whacked venomously at the creaking, spinning rack.

“Excuse me,” he said to the sighing mother, “do you mind?” He reached over her and stilled the tower of cards.

The woman ignored him, tugged the child away and hissed something about being good.

Tibo reached out and took the card. It was another goddess but a goddess in a different guise, dark-haired, like Agathe, not the insipid blonde from the forest, nude too but not accidentally exposed, deliberately and provocatively naked and not glaring furiously from behind a raised arm either. This one was lying on a satin-draped couch, gazing languorously from a mirror, exposing her cello-curved back and those rounded buttocks (exactly the mouth-watering colour of Turkish delight dusted with fine icing sugar), piling her hair up off her shoulders in tendrils around soft white fingers and looking out from the mirror with eyes that said, “Yes, it’s you at last. I’ve been waiting here for ages. Come in and shut the door.” This one, this was Agathe. Good Mayor Krovic looked at the back of the card. There was the usual printed division with “This side for message,” “This side for address” and a grey square with “Affix postage here” and in two lines at the bottom, it said,
“The Rokeby Venus
, The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London.”

The queue moved on. Tibo handed both cards to the assistant. They trembled in his fingers. The noise of them knocking together filled the room. Mayor Krovic did not wait for his change.

The attendants, in their brass-buttoned blazers, standing by the door, startled him as he tucked the little packet hurriedly inside his jacket and ducked outside. “Good day, Mayor Krovic.”

“Yes. Bye!” he squeaked and rushed down the steps.

It wasn’t long before Tibo began to feel very foolish indeed. He had purchased two postcards—that was all. Postcards of the sort that were sold in the respectable surroundings of Dot Museum,
not the sort of thing that sailors brought home from the markets of Tangier. They were images of a kind that could be shown to schoolchildren. They
were
shown to schoolchildren almost every day, for goodness’ sake. Indeed, the mayor and council of Dot would be failing in their duty to the young people of the city if images of that nature were not widely available in every classroom. Those postcards were pure and healthy celebrations of the human form. They represented crowning pinnacles of European art and culture. And yet Tibo was unaccountably warm and, for the second time that day, he found himself battling the temptation to feel terribly, terribly guilty. He looked at his watch. It was almost twelve.

In Braun’s department store, waitresses in crisp black uniforms would be collecting stacks of saucers and tidying away the coffee pots and brushing crumbs of choux pastry off the tablecloths with white horsehair brushes. Dot was thinking about lunch and Tibo had had enough of a holiday. He turned back along the Ampersand, heading for City Square again and, as he walked between the elm trees, he found himself, from time to time, patting his jacket pocket, just to be sure that the small rectangular stiffness was still there and, from time to time, between pats, he looked backwards at the pavement behind, as if he feared some helpful citizen might suddenly touch him on the shoulder and say, “Mayor Krovic, did you drop these?”

Nobody did. When Tibo arrived at the Town Hall, the cards were still in his pocket. They were still in his pocket when he bounded up the green marble staircase to his office, still there when he went in and still there when, for the first time since he sacked Nowak, the City Treasurer, for goosing three girls in the typing pool, he closed the door to Mrs. Stopak’s room. Good Mayor Krovic took the cards out of his pocket. Without opening the bag he put them in his desk drawer and locked them away.

The cup of coffee which Agathe had brought him that morning was still on its saucer quivering under a skin of milk. Tibo moved it to one side and slid the paper out of his leather-framed blotter. He turned it over. The underside was clean and bare. He pushed it into place. He smoothed it down. He made sure his
inkwell and his pen set and his desk calendar were all nicely squared up and standing to attention. He leaned back in his chair. Everything was right. Neat. Nothing odd or out of place. Good.

Tibo Krovic stood up and opened the door to Agathe’s room again. She looked up from her typewriter and smiled. She had that same look, with her hair piled high and the soft tendrils that curled over her neck, that same look in her eyes that said, “You at last. I’ve been waiting here for ages. Come in and shut the door.”

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“Yes, thanks. Fine.”

“Sure?”

“Yes. Just the coffee you gave me. I forgot to drink it. I’ll have to go and pour it out.”

Tibo retreated back into his office and emerged a moment later with the coffee cup.

“I can do that,” said Agathe.

“No, it’s fine. Don’t bother.” And he made his way carefully down the corridor towards the marble security of the Gents, where he rinsed out his cup, squeaked away the tidemark ring of milk with his thumb under a running tap and took calming gulps of bracing, bleach-soaked air. Old Peter Stavo was nothing if not thorough.

Tibo’s hands were wet. He pushed them through his hair and tugged his waistcoat down flat. In the mirror, he saw the Mayor of Dot again. The Mayor of Dot is not the sort of person to purchase questionable postcards. It was the Mayor of Dot who walked back along the corridor past the picture of Mayor Skolvig’s last stand and the boards with the golden names of all his predecessors but it was Tibo Krovic who walked past Mrs. Stopak’s desk and saw her and smelled her perfume and thought about those postcards and wondered. He hurried into his room and sat down.

“Do you want anything else? More coffee?” Agathe called. “Only I’m planning on going for lunch soon.”

Tibo was about to tell her not to bother when he looked up and found her there, standing on the other side of his desk. “No. I’m fine, thanks. Honestly. Thanks.”

“So how was your tour of inspection?”

“It was fine. Fine too.”

“Spot anything that needs done? Something to get to work on?”

“Couple of things. Small things. Nothing too much to worry about. Maybe a little job for the City Engineer and I might have a word with the Director of Arts and Culture about staffing. We can talk about it later.”

“All right,” said Agathe. “After lunch.”

“Yes.” Tibo hesitated. “Do you have plans? I suppose you’ll be meeting Stopak.”

“No. I went mad and treated myself to a new lunch box and I made some nice sandwiches and I’m going to enjoy them in the square, by the fountain. Lots of the girls do it.”

“Yes, I’ve seen them,” said Tibo.

They had run out of things to say. So, instead of saying, “For God’s sake, Agathe, let’s just get out of here, run down to the ferry and sail away to Dash and get a room in a hotel and spend all night there drinking champagne and making love until we’re sick and not come home until morning!,” Tibo said nothing at all.

“Right, then,” said Agathe. “I’ll let you get on.”

“Yes. Right. Enjoy your lunch.” And Tibo burrowed amongst his empty in-tray until she had gone. He waited, listening. He went to the door that linked their rooms. She had definitely gone. He looked round the corner of the door towards her desk. She was not there.

Tibo walked out of the office, off the thick blue municipal carpet and into the cold, hard terrazzo corridor that led to the back stairs. If he went down and past Peter Stavo’s little glass box, he could reach the square. He went up, past the Planning Department, past the City Engineer and the Town Clerk, past Licensing and Entertainments, up three floors until the stairs grew small and narrow and ran out against a blank door.

Tibo took a bunch of keys from his pocket and flicked through it. He opened the door and stepped into a small white room. Dust
from the rotting plaster covered the floor. There were ladders and buckets stacked against the walls, nameless shapes draped in grey sheets and four wooden steps that led up to another tiny door. Tibo climbed again and walked out into the sky. He was surrounded by blue, like my statue standing alone on the topmost crag of the cathedral, wrapped in blue from the sky above his head to the dark smudge on the horizon that might be the ferry coming home. Blue.

He gazed down into the square, down amongst the pigeons and the shoppers and the Town Hall clerks heading to the pie shop, looking for Agathe, the shape of her, the walk of her. And there she was, sitting down on the edge of the fountain, leaning back, letting the sunshine fall on her face as she turned it up to the sky, her handbag and her lunch box safely tucked away under her feet.

Good Mayor Krovic looked at her, at her blue dress, her blue enamel lunch box, the blue of the wide-open sky over Dot reflected in the sparkling water of the fountain and all of them outshone by the cornflower blue of her eyes which he pretended he could see shining from the other side of the square and, suddenly, he found himself saying “cerulean.” Tibo was like that. It happened sometimes. For no reason that he could tell, beautiful words would form themselves in his mind. “Sirocco”—that was one—and “caryatid”—that was another. Cerulean, sirocco, caryatid. And then, on other days, he would find himself struggling to remember things. “What’s the word for a pillar carved in female form?” and “caryatid” would stay out of reach, just beyond his recall until he began to wonder, “Am I getting old? Am I losing my marbles?”

Lately, he had started finding thick, bristly tree trunks sprouting amongst his eyebrows. Tibo was not a noticeably vain man but he admitted to himself that he was having trouble keeping them under control and, the other night, he thought he might bleed to death after a less than successful attempt to shave away unwelcome hairs that had sprouted, wolf-like, from his ears. “Old. I am getting old,” he sighed.

But at moments like this, moments when he looked at Agathe Stopak for as long as he wanted, when he was able to drink her in, Tibo didn’t think of growing old.

A wind came in from Dash and curled the town flag around him. Tibo caught one corner in his fist and kissed it. He was still looking at Agathe when he let it go.

EFORE LONG, THE CATHEDRAL BELLS BEGAN
to chime again. The clerks and the shop girls and Agathe started drifting back from lunch. When she reached the office, Good Mayor Krovic was already sitting at his desk, just where she had left him. The newspaper folded open at the half-done crossword, the empty coffee cup and the piles of biscuit crumbs—they all told a story.

“Mayor Krovic, you should eat better,” Agathe said and she swept the crumbs into a cupped hand.

“I’ll have something proper tonight.”

“Just so long as you do. You want to do those letters now?”

She went to her desk for her notebook, came back, sat in the green chair opposite Tibo’s desk and copied down his letter to the City Engineer and another to the Director of Arts and Culture.

“Do you think we need men to open the doors of the museum for visitors?” Tibo asked her.

“Is that all they do?”

“I think it might be.”

“Then I’m not sure,” said Agathe. “What are we paying them?”

“I don’t know that either. That’s why I want to talk to the Director.”

“Well,” Agathe was hesitant, “I wouldn’t want to see anybody lose their job but, on the other hand, as a ratepayer …”

“Yes, that’s what I thought.”

“One more question,” said Agathe, “then I’ll decide. These door-openers—do they have them at the museum in Umlaut?”

“A vital question that goes to the heart of the matter as usual,” said Tibo. “I’ll be sure to ask the Director.”

The afternoon passed slowly in clock ticks and typewriter taps and coffee cups. The
Evening Dottian
arrived and Tibo was pleased to see he had been pushed off the front page by a fire in Arnolfini’s liquorice factory. Nobody hurt, production back to normal by tomorrow. The morning paper still lay folded on his desk, one clue of the crossword blaring its empty triumph to the room.